TheWireCutter to absorb TheSweetHome

[Ryuzaki]

Oh boy. This has been quite the adventure and it's not remotely over.

I can't remember who and how it got started but the guy wasn't a noob and clearly had access to people. Take that to mean the obvious. That was 2011.

In 2016, The New York Times bought the two sites for over $30 million. And now they're wising up and putting all of the eggs in one basket to get the compounding power out of it.

The Sweet Home will be rolled into The Wire Cutter, all of the content ported over and 301'd, HTTPS, and all that jazz. The only difference in the sites were that one was for everyday life items and included gadgets and appliances and the other was only about gadgets and appliances.

Ironically you could find the review for the Best Wirecutters on The Sweet Home. They realized how goofy this was too and are about to amass a power house of ranking.

It'll be fun to watch and see how seamless this goes over and to watch their traffic graphs explode.

A fun thing to note is that they're getting away with everything the rest of us catch penalties and bans for too. They list Amazon prices without using the API, which fall out of date. They ask people to use their Amazon affiliate links for all purchases to help them get paid. They have a site entirely of content that would get the rest of us hit by Fred. They're traffic explosion and backlink profile was kind of suspect at the start too. I got my VIP ticket to the Hater's Ball.

Anyways, the whole point was to make everyone aware that this was going down in case they want to watch. We might glean some interesting info we can use for our own projects from it.

Source: http://thewirecutter.com/blog/wirecutter-but-for-everything/

 

[serpape]

I've been monitoring thewirecutter for a while and it's been interesting to see the site's journey thus far.

I noted the same on their backlink profile. The founder was a former Gizmodo editor (interesting story of him and Steve Jobs if you guys remember the iPhone leak fiasco years ago http://thewirecutter.com/blog/steve-jobs-was-always-kind-to-me-or-regrets-of-an-asshole/) so he obviously had connections with journalists. Bit of a tug job under the table here and there resulted in them accumulating some incredible backlinks early on. Then it all snowballed there. No disrespect to their content either, easily one of the best in the industry.

Their dominance in the SERP will continue but I suspect by going broad, they will leave some breadcrumbs in the market for smaller players like us. I'm personally building a more niche focused product review site, with same focus on content quality (hiring actual experts to review products in-depth, go nuts on longtail). Obviously nothing groundbreaking but there are gaps in the market for us.

 

[Prentzz]

I remember an obscure interview in the last couple years in which Brian Lam said he was planning to open another version of WC/SH, which would be for another niche. I believe that the unification of these two websites is less to do with combining the power and more to do with create an all-in-one site so that they can expand into other niches a la bestproducts.com

I for one welcome our new review site overlords

 

[backwoods]

Recent interview with current president of Wirecutter and BuzzFeed's product labs lead and their content and affiliate strategy...

 

[Prentzz]

This finally happened btw. Took them long enough. Graphs.

 

[Ryuzaki]

TheWireCutter has just shown again what I went to great lengths to show previously about how 301 Redirects behave in Google now, although they did it across domains while I did it across URLs on the same domain:

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Above is their Ahrefs data, showing organic traffic and organic keywords subtracting from one site and being added to the other domain seamlessly. The whole exchange took maybe 3 months max, it seems.

Below is the same information from SEMRush, showing their estimated traffic count based on the keywords they find them ranking for:

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301's are good to go, and TheWireCutter (argh, I added a space in the 2nd pic!) is encroaching on everyone's territory. The game is changing, my friends.

 

[Prentzz]

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@Ryuzaki nice! Give it a another 3 months and I imagine they'll have nearly all of those Sweethome rankings back on Wirecutter. They really are encroaching hard, slapping the goaltender in the face and still getting the point. Even niches which laughed and thought they were safe are *sweat dripping gif* i.e. adult, credit cards, cars. I won't be surprised if they start going into X Review keywords, X vs Y etc. As well as insurance industry, software, online services (hosting reviews anybody) and maybe even accounts (forex, casinos) etc. Tick tock.